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CONVERSATIONS WITH REMARKABLE MINDS The US State Department, its changing role and mission, and the loss of America’s influence in the world Colonel Lawrence (Larry) Wilkerson is a retired US Army Colonel and the former chief of staff to General Colin Powell while he was Secretary of State. He is currently a Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Government and Public …

Multi-trillion dollar corporate and investor tax cuts by December have moved to the top of the Republican Congress-Trump legislative agenda. Dr. Rasmus puts the proposals in historical context, describing the corporate-investor tax cuts from Reagan through Clinton and GW Bush to Obama and now Trump. From the $750 billion Reagan bill in 1981-82 to Bush’s $3.7 trillion to Bush-Obama $480 …

We are all Muslims. Either that, or we shall be torn apart as a nation, given over to Trump-Republicans’ vomit of hate for all that defines human rights and a free society. It gets worse by the minute, the immigration issue merely code for venting spleen on a whole range of issues intimately connected with America’s loss of undisputed pre-eminence …

The war between Donald Trump and the nation’s labor unions is on. Labor leaders, who spent almost $100 million campaigning against Trump, said after the election they’d give him a chance to deliver on his pro-worker agenda. But the cease-fire eroded in the last two days. First, Trump blasted an Indiana union boss personally on Twitter, prompting a blistering response …

Dr. Sally Edwards has many years of experience in engaging a wide range of stakeholders to promote the environmental health of communities and develop safer and greener products. She is a senior research associate at the Lowell Center for Sustainable Production at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. She is a co- founder of the Chemical Footprint Project, which is designed to recognize corporate leadership in the use of safer chemicals. Sally facilitates the work of the Green Chemistry and Commerce Council’s Retailer Leadership Council, whose mission is to promote safer chemicals, materials and products across retail supply chains. Eight major retailers are active participants in the RLC. Sally also serves on the board of directors for Women’s Voices for the Earth. Sally holds a MS in Environmental Health Science from Harvard University and a BA in Human Biology from Stanford University. She completed her doctorate in Work Environment at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Her book, Beyond Child’s Play: Sustainable Product Design in the Global Doll-Making Industry, was published in 2009.

It looks like the major media outlets are doing their full court press to lay the groundwork for the passage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). In recent weeks the news and opinion pages have been filled with articles and columns on the wonders of trade and why all good people should support trade deals like the TPP. In fact, some …

Our country’s “free trade” agreements have followed a framework of trading away our democracy and middle-class prosperity in exchange for letting the biggest corporations dominate. There are those who say any increase in trade is good. But if you close a factory here and lay off the workers, open the factory “there” to make the same things the factory here …

While publicly opposing an international free trade agreement, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was secretly lobbying Democratic members of Congress to support the deal as her newly released emails disclosed. Due to Clinton’s history of dishonesty and political flip-flopping, Sen. Bernie Sanders believes she will change her stance on the TPP and support the detrimental trade deal if she is elected …

All the money in the world is growing ever more concentrated in the hands of just a few people, a report released Sunday night makes clear. Just 62 ultra-rich individuals — a list that is primarily made up of men and includes Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, the Koch Brothers and the Walmart heirs — have as much wealth as the bottom …

They consist of 16,000 individuals, about the size of a crowd at a professional basketball game. The inequality horror they’ve fomented is reaching far beyond the half of America that is in or near poverty, for it now impacts those of us well above the median, those of us in the second highest of four wealth quartiles. 1. The .01% …